1. Technical Field
The invention relates to displaying content and advertisements on mobile hand-held devices. More particularly, the invention relates to improving the quality of the user experience during content viewing in connection with bandwidth-limited transmission of data.
2. Description of the Background Art
Content viewing on mobile handheld devices (MHDs) is beginning to become popular. However, in most cases the quality of the viewed image is fuzzy and intermittent due to the variable nature of the bandwidth that is available to connect the MHD to the source or transmitter of content. The volume of data to be viewed as content prevents the pre-downloading and storing of data on the MHD to improve this situation.
Alternate content, including advertisements, to be viewed with the content, on the other hand is typically downloaded and stored on the MHD and inserted at predefined advertisement spots (ad spots) during content viewing by a micro-splicer residing on the MHD. The features and operation of a typical micro-splicer is explained in detail in the co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/828,204, Micro-splicer for Inserting Alternate Content to a Content Stream on a Handheld device, filed 25 Jul. 2007, assigned to common assignee, which application is incorporated herein in its entirety by the reference thereto. The content for viewing is hence buffered on the MHD as the user of the MHD enables the viewing process.
The rendering of the content for viewing typically starts only when the buffer crosses a threshold of fill. This is done to provide the user with a reasonable level of quality of viewing experience. Once the rendering and viewing starts, depending on the bandwidth available for the content down load, the buffer is replenished or depleted. When the buffer on the MHD is depleted, the viewing experience degrades. This is because there is no time to retrieve dropped packets and enable full frame displays to retain the viewing quality. Hence, with a depleted buffer on the MHD the user sees fuzzy and partial frames which result in a very low quality viewing experience.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a way of improving the viewing quality by allowing the buffer on the MHD to be replenished while the user of the MHD is able to watch full frames of information, even in a low bandwidth availability situation.